Rosie Thomas 3-Book Collection

by Rosie Thomas

  At first, going to Oxford had been no more than a teasing idea for Chloe. She had wanted to prove to Leo that she could win a place, and she had wanted to show him that it impressed her so little that she could turn it down without a second thought. Then she had found herself enjoying the preparation for the entrance papers, hurrying home to dig poetry books out of the inner pocket of her briefcase instead of going out to cocktails and dinners with friends from the agency. She had started to use the cool, remote thought of Oxford as an antidote for her grating London world.

  Yet, even so, when the moment finally came she was shocked to hear herself saying, ‘Thank you, Dr Hale. I’ll do my very best. And I’d like to start in October.’

  Now, Leo was back in Manhattan, or with his top-drawer wife up in East Hampton or wherever it was. Chloe Campbell was slowing down before the Oxford bypass, her car loaded with her expensive but not-too-new-looking leather suitcases, piles of crisp empty notebooks and brand new standard texts, and feeling as apprehensive as any sensitive adolescent on the way to a new school. It was too late now. Chloe negotiated the tangled city traffic, and parked the Renault defiantly half on and half off the pavement on Folly Bridge. Only a single window in the old house showed a light.

  Chloe hitched her shaggy wolf-pelt jacket closer around her and began to pick her way down the slippery stone steps. Her hair looked as bright as a beacon in the wintry dusk. Before she reached the front door which had barred Helen’s entry, it swung open and Gerry Pole lounged out. His grey sweater was filthy and his lined face was unshaven, but the tattered remnants of a more wholesome romantic youth clung about him. Chloe responded with a brief flicker of interest as Gerry grinned at her.

  ‘One of Rose’s new tenants, I take it? And very lovely, too. I’m Gerry Pole, by the way, token male on the premises …’

  ‘Oh, good,’ Chloe said quickly, waving up towards her car perched on the bridge. ‘Perhaps, then, you could possibly give me a hand with my things? So inaccessible, down here.’

  ‘Delighted.’ Gerry smiled again, showing off the attractive crinkles around his pale blue eyes and revealing uncared-for teeth.

  So Chloe made her entrance into Follies House burdened with nothing more than her handbag and her portable typewriter. Gerry obligingly toiled to and fro with the leather cases and set them carefully down in Chloe’s first-floor room. The long windows looked out on almost total blackness now, but the little lamps inside glowed invitingly on panelled walls and solid furniture. Chloe looked around her with approval. The panelling was painted soft bluey-green, like a bird’s egg, and the curtains and faded Persian rugs stood out against it in warm reds and garnets. She laid her typewriter down on the bare desk and switched on the green-shaded library lamp to make a little, welcoming circle of light.

  Here, Chloe thought with a sigh of satisfaction, she could work. Books. Peace, calm and no hassles. Perhaps this crazy idea was going to work out after all. A little sound from behind her reminded her that Gerry was still hovering by the door. She shot him a brilliant, dismissive smile.

  ‘Thanks very much. I expect we’ll be meeting again soon, if you live here too?’

  ‘Oh yes, certain to,’ Gerry rubbed his dry hands expectantly. ‘I could more than do with a drink now, in fact, after all that lifting. Won’t you join me? I’ve got a little something …’

  The flip-flop shuffle of down-at-heel slippers came up the stairs and along the gallery towards them. A second later the mass of Rose’s bulk filled the doorway. She jerked her head at her half-brother and, with surprising speed, he was on his way.

  ‘Another time, then,’ he winked at Chloe and vanished.

  Rose eased herself down on the foot of the bed and rested her podgy hands on her spread knees. The two women smiled.

  ‘Still not quite sure about it, eh?’ Rose asked. Chloe took off her jacket and stood stroking the fur absently.

  ‘Not a hundred per cent,’ she admitted. ‘Or even fifty. Sometimes it feels like a crazy decision to have made, three years up here reading George Eliot and trying to make ends meet on a grant. Not that it isn’t perfect to be at Follies House,’ she added warmly.

  Rose chuckled flatly and her little eyes flickered over the diamonds in Chloe’s ears, the discreet but heavy gold chain around her neck and the supple, rust suede of her tunic dress. ‘Don’t tell me that girls like you ever have to manage on a grant,’ she murmured. ‘And you’ll enjoy it here, mark my words. All kinds of people to meet, for a start. Different from your London ad men.’

  ‘I hope so,’ countered Chloe fervently.

  ‘Look at me,’ Rose went on. ‘I just have this house, nothing else. But enough goes on here to keep me looking forward to tomorrow.’ As she winked at Chloe she looked, for an instant, very like her half-brother. ‘So long as I choose the right people to live with me here at Follies, I have everything I need in these four walls. Which is just as well, because where could I go outside with a face and figure like mine?’ The white hands fluttered vaguely over the forbidding fleshy mass. Chloe could do no more than turn the talk with a question.

  ‘Who else lives here now? Since Colin Page’s sister left?’

  Rose’s face brightened in anticipation. ‘Ah. All new this term. You, dear, of course. A little mite called Helen, who you shall meet in one second, unless my predatory young cousin has swept her out of the house already. And by the end of the week there’ll be a pretty love called Pansy. Such a beautiful name, isn’t it? There’s just the three of you. I think you’ll make such an interesting combination.’ Rose’s fingers knitted across the mound of her stomach as she nodded happily at Chloe. Just for the moment she looked like a complacent puppet-mistress with her pretty dolls on sticks, waiting for the show to start. The idea amused Chloe rather than alarmed her. Why shouldn’t Rose live a little through her lodgers, after all?

  The landlady heaved herself to her feet and padded to the door.

  ‘Helen!’ she shouted up into the darkness. ‘Helen, darling, come down and meet a new friend.’

  Chloe wasn’t sure who she had been expecting as another member of Rose’s ‘family’, but the figure who appeared obediently a moment later came as a surprise.

  ‘Helen Brown, Chloe Campbell,’ Rose said easily. ‘And now I’m off. Tell me if you need anything simple. Anything strenuous, ask Gerry.’

  ‘Hello,’ Chloe said to the girl in the doorway. Helen was small and fine-boned, too thin, with collarbones that showed at the stretched neckline of her royal blue sweater. In her grey corduroy skirt she might have been a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl, but something in the poised tilt of her head told Chloe that she was older, twenty or perhaps even a little more. Her skin was very pale and creamy under a mass of short black curls, and the huge grey eyes in the heart-shaped face were smudged underneath with violet shadows.

  ‘Hello,’ Helen responded warily. There was an exotic atmosphere in the room that wasn’t just compounded of expensive scent and suede, nor of the rich colours and fine proportions that were missing from her own room upstairs. The atmosphere came from the girl herself, prowling like a taut red-brown tiger on the Persian rug. Yet as soon as Chloe smiled at her it was different again. She looked ordinary, friendly and inquisitive now. Chloe seized Helen by the wrist and propelled her to an armchair.

  ‘For God’s sake, sit here and talk to me while I get my bearings. It’s my first day at Oxford, and you’re the first real person I’ve met. Are you new, too?’

  Helen shook her curls vigorously. ‘No. My last year. But it’s my first time living out of College. Follies isn’t exactly my natural habitat either. It’s been a strange day.’

  Chloe was rummaging in one of her bags. At length she lifted out a green and gold bottle and brandished it triumphantly. ‘Share this with me? It won’t be very cold, but it’ll do.’

  Helen watched the champagne sparkle into a pair of glasses and then lifted hers to Chloe. The strangeness of the day evidently wasn’t over yet, and something inside he
r didn’t want it to be.

  ‘Welcome to Oxford,’ she toasted the newcomer.

  ‘And to Follies House.’ Chloe’s bright green eyes glittered at her over the glass and they drank together.

  They finished the bottle as Chloe unpacked. Helen sat curled up in the armchair with her cold feet underneath her and listened as the other girl talked. The champagne sent unfamiliar waves of warmth and lassitude through her veins, and she found herself sinking into the cushions and smiling at the warm colours and scents around her. Chloe’s cases seemed to contain unbelievable piles of silks and cashmere and butter-soft leather, marching ranks of shoes and boots, and handbags in soft, protective wrappings.

  There were other pretty, more eccentric things too. A huge, fragile butterfly gaudily painted on rice paper swung airily on one wall. A silver-framed mirror bore the raised motto ‘Look, but linger not’. Chloe made a mock-grimace into it as she swung it into place on the mantelpiece. A collection of heart-shaped tortoiseshell frames all seemed to enclose pictures of different men. All these Chloe laid out among the vanity cases, silver hairbrushes and tiny crystal bottles.

  All the time, as she moved to and fro, Chloe went on talking. Had Helen but known it, she needed to talk more than anything else. She needed to put London firmly behind her; Leo and the agency and San Lorenzo and everything else. Almost by accident, the possibility of Oxford had today become a reality. Chloe was so used to feeling confident that it was doubly disconcerting to be nervous and apprehensive. Talking to this quiet girl seemed to help. She told Helen everything, but it was as much for Chloe’s own benefit. The explanation helped to put this mad, life-changing decision into perspective. She had no need of an Oxford degree and it was exactly the abstract, stringent challenge set by gaining one that Chloe knew she needed.

  With the last drop of champagne she smoothed a remaining square of tissue paper and tucked it into the last empty suitcase. Helen, who had drunk the lion’s share of the champagne as she listened, smiled vaguely up at her.

  ‘So here I am.’ Chloe gestured theatrically. ‘Unfettered, and as yet unlettered …’ they giggled happily, ‘… although Dr Hale is about to put that right. And feeling much, much better.’

  She stopped in front of Helen and put her hand over the younger girl’s. ‘Thank you for listening to all that. You’re a good listener, aren’t you?’ On impulse she knelt down and took both of Helen’s thin hands between her own warm ones.

  ‘Helen, I’ve done all the talking, like a self-centred old witch. Now you tell me some things. You’re sad, aren’t you? Why’s that?’

  Helen looked into Chloe’s concerned eyes and in an instant the champagne, her loneliness and this unexpected warmth from a woman she barely knew blurred inside her. Boiling tears swept down her face. In an instant Chloe’s arms came round her and Helen’s face was buried in soft suede and the thick mass of dark red hair.

  ‘What? Helen, what is it?’

  There was a second’s quiet before she answered. ‘My father. My father killed himself.’

  At once Chloe’s arm tightened around the younger girl’s thin shoulders, but she said nothing.

  ‘Yes,’ said Helen after a moment, speaking as softly as if to herself. ‘It was in the summer. The middle of August, when the world was hottest and brightest outside. Daddy must have found that very hard, looking inwards at the darkness gathering for him in our house. I suppose it had been dark for weeks before that, months even. At the end, it was as if everything positive and hopeful had wilted, through lack of light. Even our love for him seemed to have no life in it any more, because he couldn’t lean on it. Right at the end, in the last hopeless days, I was still sure that it would brighten the gloom for him. But it didn’t, because he killed himself.’

  ‘Why did he do it?’ Chloe whispered, as gently as she could, and felt an answering movement that might have been a shrug.

  ‘It’s a banal story, I suppose,’ Helen told her with a new bitterness in her voice. ‘He lost his job. Not a particularly high-powered job, or anything, just as a middle manager in a middle-sized manufacturing company. My father was always a quiet man – grey, they call it here – quietly doing what he was supposed to do. He came home in the evenings on the train, mowed the lawn, listened to the radio, did what was involved in being a husband and father, but mostly he just did his unassuming job. He must have enjoyed it … no, perhaps needed it is nearer the truth. Because when they took it away, he collapsed inside. They did it all particularly brutally, just pushed him out with a tiny amount of compensation. But that’s not unusual. In my father’s case, I think he knew from the first moment that there was no chance of finding another job. And he wasn’t the kind of man who could turn round and just create another life for himself. He was too mild, and puzzled, and overwhelmed by the circumstances of the life he already had. He just let himself feel shamed and rejected. There was no money, you see. He had no prospects at all, and there was nothing he could do for us or anyone else. So he retreated further into the dark and silence, leaving us behind. Until the day came when he went into the garage, locked the doors and turned the car engine on. He lay down on a tartan knee rug that we used to keep on the back seat. Do you know, he was still wearing a tie?’

  ‘What about your mother?’ Chloe asked.

  ‘She loved him. It was the worst kind of shock for her. She’s not very good at being alone.’ Helen rubbed her face with the flat of her hand and, as if noticing that Chloe’s arms were still around her, stiffened and drew back a little. Chloe let her go, noticing the tired pallor and the shadows under her eyes.

  ‘And you?’ she asked. Helen shrugged again.

  ‘There are money problems, of course. My mother does some part-time supply teaching, and there’s a tiny pension. But my brother is still a child, really, and needs everything. And there’s a big mortgage, the three of us to clothe and feed, all the household bills. So much money to find, and nowhere …’ Helen’s voice trailed away hopelessly. When she spoke again the reawakening of anxiety had drained away all the colour that the champagne had put into her cheeks. ‘I shouldn’t be here. I should never have come back. The right thing would have been to get a job, doing anything, anywhere. Whatever brings in the most money. I can help a tiny bit out of my grant, but …’ The shrug, when it came, was defeated, ‘… it isn’t enough.’

  ‘But they insisted, your mother and brother, that you did come back? Said you’d be letting them down, and your father, if you didn’t?’

  Helen smiled wryly. ‘Exactly. How did you know that?’

  Chloe laughed at her. ‘Because it’s what any right-thinking people would have said. It matters, doesn’t it? You’re probably very bright.’

  Helen was too natural to attempt a modest contradiction.

  ‘I’m bright enough. I could get a First, if I’m lucky. Before Dad died I’d wanted to stay on and do research. Now, of course, I’ll have to look for something that’s more of a paying proposition. But not to have got a degree at all, that would have been very hard.’

  As she watched the anxiety in Helen’s face, Chloe felt the weight of her own privilege. Her own background was not wealthy, but never at any time since her early and rapid success at her job had she had to deny herself anything. Travel, new books, designer clothes, a luxurious flat were as much an unquestioned part of her life as they were remote from Helen’s. Chloe reflected that even her place at Oxford had begun as a move in her sexual game with Leo. Set beside Helen’s difficulties and her family’s sacrifices, that suddenly seemed frivolous and wasteful. She shook herself in irritation and turned to listen to Helen again. The other girl’s face was brighter and more animated now.

  ‘It’s strange to be back here, after so much. And in this weird house …’

  ‘Isn’t it?’ Chloe grinned at her.

  ‘… I’d only been in the house an hour before Oliver Mortimore appeared, kissed me, and asked me to tea on Friday.’

  ‘Who’s that?’

 
Helen’s smile transformed her face and the grey eyes shone with amusement in the absence of the shadows. She had no idea why she was talking like this to Chloe, but it felt perfectly natural.

  ‘Oh, a bright star in the local firmament. Rich, titled, amusing, and the most beautiful young man you ever saw.’

  ‘Love the sound of it,’ said Chloe, ‘but does such a sum of perfection do anything as ordinary as have tea?’

  The sound of their laughter reached Rose as she slid across the dark hallway below, and it brought a flicker of a satisfied smiled to her broad face.

  ‘Now I’m sitting here drinking champagne and talking to you as if I’ve always known you,’ Helen went on. ‘Odd, isn’t it? It feels a long way from home, too, and that isn’t fair.’ The sadness flooded back into her face.

  ‘Listen to me, Helen,’ Chloe said firmly. ‘It would be wrong to destroy the value of being back here by immersing yourself in guilt and grief. That would make your family’s sacrifice useless, wouldn’t it? You can’t forget your father’s death – how could you? – and you shouldn’t try. But you can find your own strength to carry on positively, where he couldn’t.’ Chloe broke off and bit her lip. Her face reddened as she met Helen’s serious straight gaze. ‘I don’t know why I’m preaching at you,’ Chloe said uncomfortably, ‘particularly when I’ve got the feeling that there are several things for me to learn myself before too long.’

  The silence stretched on for a second or two before Helen broke it. ‘You’re right, though. Thank you, Chloe. Tea on Friday with Oliver,’ she added lightly. ‘I’ll have to be profoundly positive to cope with that. Will you … do you think you could lend me something beautiful to wear?’

  There was relief in Chloe’s face as she responded warmly, ‘With pleasure. To seal the deal, let’s go out and eat now – I’m ravenous. You tell me where’s good, and I’ll treat you. Okay?’